Our 6-day Participatory Video Workshop is an initiative born out of our No Room for Manoeuvre film project. It is a programme with a difference that will fully engage young people and make a qualitative, lasting difference to their lives. The programme has been specifically designed for young people at risk of marginalisation or exclusion from school. During the filming of No Room for Manoeuvre we found our approach to working with young people worked. We were able to provide them with a working atmosphere in which they felt relaxed and focused, and could therefore constructively engage in the making of the feature documentary No Room for Manoeuvre.

The programme will help participants gain confidence, develop their artistic talents, produce good-quality video products and engage effectively with new, interactive media platforms and improve their life skills and employability.

Participants will be guided into the heart of the video-making process. Guarantied to be absorbing and exciting, it will give young people a chance to produce creative videos about their lives, their communities and the wider world they live in. Upon completing the workshops, they will have gained a deeper sense of their own identity, a greater sense of control over their lives, a greater sense of direction in life, a heightened sense of awareness of and empathy for others, a feeling of pride arising from their accomplishments and a memory of an uplifting, interesting and socially supportive experience to cherish.

Experienced mentors of excellent character and proven ability to assist participants grasp and apply instructions, explore themes and develop concise, striking story lines. They will help individual participants articulate their ideas, put technical knowledge into practice, and build up confidence

Teaching methods and group exercises that stimulate teamwork, interaction and reflection

Teaching on the fundamentals of good digital story telling; choosing themes, developing mood boards, looking at how people are portrayed and the use of language

Instruction in camera techniques and how to record moving images and sound

Instruction in basic video editing

Providing a safe environment and friendly atmosphere

Ethical considerations on working within the community

Assistance participants reach out to community members to participate in interviews and film shoots.

Providing each participant with a DVD of the final video product(s).

Discussing ways to use the video for advocacy with partners to address challenges identified.

An end-of-programme community screening and other avenues for sharing the video(s) and messages with a wider audience.

By the end of the workshop sessions, the participants working in groups will have made their own videos, the best of which will have been uploaded online and disseminated through social media.

Mentoring

Mentoring is an integral to our working methodology. Our mentors are selected for their proven aptitude for 1) helping young people focus independently and 2) engaging them in group activities. Our mentors have the skills required to help young people channel their creativity and thoughts into re-affirmative learning and develop communication skills.

In the showing and telling of stories through the videos they create, the participants will show the climb – be this from a variety of problems in their situations or from a nebulous understanding of contentious issues in their society – to greater understanding and realisation about the need for personal and social change and how this can be achieved. The programme will emphasis as part of the story building process the importance of making conscious choices to take responsibility and develop one's thinking to constructively affect one's own situation and the world we live in. Thus, participants will not only with a sense of achievement from having produced their own videos, but also with a stronger sense of identity and a greater aptitude for mindfulness.

Post Workshop Completion

Participants are given practical post-completion activities to carry out and will be asked to keep an individual or group journal. They will be asked to submit their journals at a future date, giving us the opportunity to follow up on the workshop's impact on their lives.

We are sure they will naturally incline to use the knowledge and skills they gained in the workshop to serve as positive role models and mentors for their peers in their daily lives. In this way, the benefits of the workshop will extend to their communities.

Each workshop programme will be limited to 12 participants to maximise the personal attention given to participants.

Kojo Jantuah, working together with DFMC video instructors and the workshop mentors, will lead key workshop sessions and supervise the integration and progression between all workshop sessions delivered on the programme. He will provide guidance to participants from start to finish applying aspects of his 12 stage set of principles and guidelines for a life or video project journey in which change is consciously orchestrated rather than the result of spurious reactions. Themes he will introduce participants to include: Identity - Life purpose - Conflict resolution – Motivation - Risk and Fear – Leadership – Self-awareness - Choices and Responsibility - Controlled reaction to change - Communication and interpersonal skills - Clarity of purpose and objective - Goal-setting – Planning and organisation – Selecting travelling companions for the trip - Teamwork - Dealing with conflicts of interest caused by individual ambition amongst team members - Motivating travelling companions - Negotiation - Perseverance and determination - Dealing with obstacles - Coping with crisis and tragedy. Kojo Jantuah will facilitate and guide participants through their video making journeys, sharing the story of his own quest for identity, life purpose and destiny as an impetus to set them forth. After his mother informed him that she had a Danish ancestor whose identity was unknown to her, Kojo followed his inner voice and left his Ghanian home at age 20 to embark on a risky journey of self-discovery and reconciliation across the dangerous central Sahara desert to successfully reach Denmark in search for his Danish relatives. The workshop participants will join him on his trip across the central Sahara. Tackling what is arguably the most dangerous migration route in the world, Kojo defied death and trekked with other people barefoot over terrain from whence Africans had been extracted from their roots and transported into slavery over the centuries. In Denmark he discovered his Danish great great great grandfather, Lieutenant Johan Wilhelm Svedstrup’s gravestone in Elsinore. Svedstrup had been a soldier who joined the Danish forces in Ghana. He had fought against slavery and slave traders in the mid-19th century. Svedstrup was knighted by the Danish king for his courage. Through his journey and reunion with his Danish relatives, Kojo came to realise that our real identity equals ‘Oneness’.

Forum for Youth Participation and Democracy (FYPD) http://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/research/academicgroups/equality/forumyouthparticipation/ The Forum for Youth Participation & Democracy is housed within the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education which has one of the largest groups of internationally known experts in educational theory, research and policy analysis and researching and teaching within the UK has one of the largest groups of internationally known experts in educational theory, research and policy analysis and researching and teaching within the UK. The Faculty members aim collectively to sustain intellectual debate about the purposes and effects of education on the promotion of education for all, democratic citizenship, social justice and inclusion, and global development. The Forum for Youth Participation & Democracy was established to draw together practitioners, young people, policy makers, and researchers from Cambridge University and around the world to explore the problem of youth exclusion in decision-making. The FYPD is particularly concerned with improving public understanding and application of the ‘Cooperative Problem-Solving’ approach, and tackling the inter-related barriers of growing socio-economic marginalisation of the young, and the persistent discrimination on the grounds of gender, race or belief. The FYPD will use as resources for generating debates both nationally and internationally, the outputs of the No Room for Manoeuvre film project, including the methodology of the From No Room to Manoeuvre to Room for Manoeuvre workshop programme, the videos and journals produced by the workshop participants (with their prior consent), and the documentary produced by the DFMC of the workshops in action. As well as involving the FYPD directly in the discussion and critique of these achievements, the FYPD will be an avenue for the dissemination and application of these outputs through their partner institutions. These include: The Cooperative College, http://www.co-op.ac.uk/schools-and-young-people, which works with a wide range of co-operatives, including a rapidly growing network of co-operative schools to which it provides advice and curriculum resources. Student Voice, http://www.co-op.ac.uk/schools-and-young-people. This student-led organisation represents the views of students across the UK. They support students to have their voices heard within their schools and communities. The DFMC's collaboration with the FYPD will benefit our other partners, opening new avenues for their work to be recognised and disseminated.